Yesterday we hosted our first ever Surrender to Lead Summit, and what struck me most was how quickly the conversation moved past aspiration and into responsibility. My highlight take away was about judgment, specifically the kind required when pressure is high, visibility is real, and the consequences of poor decisions do not show up all at once. That theme came into sharp focus in our closing keynote with Meredith Kessler.
Meredith spoke to something leaders rarely interrogate with enough honesty, which is the assumption that persistence is inherently noble. In environments that reward endurance, whether in elite sport or executive leadership, pushing through becomes a default posture rather than a conscious choice. She described how identity can quietly fuse with outcome, especially for people who have been measured, ranked, and compensated for winning over long periods of time. Ego in those contexts does not announce itself loudly. It shows up as certainty. It shows up as self trust that goes unexamined long after the conditions have changed.
What made her perspective compelling was the precision with which she described choice. Meredith articulated a clear understanding of what competing for a world championship would require, including the training load, the narrowing of life outside the sport, and the long term trade offs that accompany that level of pursuit. With that clarity, she chose alignment with purpose over winning at all costs. As she puts it, she “chose to be a world champion at life rather than a world champion at Kona.” She presented the decision as a refusal to confuse ambition with indiscriminate accumulation of effort.
That framing exposes a leadership problem we do not talk about enough. Many leaders are are failing because they have never been taught to govern momentum. Signals arrive early, whether as fatigue, diminishing returns, or erosion of what once mattered, but those signals are often negotiated away in favor of staying in motion. Movement becomes a proxy for effectiveness, and stopping or adjusting feels indistinguishable from weakness. Over time, that logic produces damage that is then misattributed to stress, burnout, or bad luck.
Meredith spoke about recalibration as an active discipline rather than a reactive correction. She described progress that is built through consistency, patience, and trust, and she named the difference between depletion driven obsession and energy sustained belief. That distinction matters because leaders who cannot tell the difference tend to optimize for short term visibility at the expense of long term viability, both for themselves and for the systems they lead.
Endurance sports make these dynamics obvious because the feedback loop is immediate and unforgiving. Leadership extends the timeline, but it does not change the underlying mechanics. Endurance is expected. What separates effective leaders from reckless ones is judgment under load, the ability to decide when persistence still serves the mission and when it has quietly detached from it. Momentum, once untethered from purpose, does not slow down on its own.
Listening to Meredith reinforced a central idea behind Surrender to Lead, which is that determination without governance is simply force applied in a direction that has not been sufficiently questioned. Left unchecked, that force accumulates consequences rather than results. Leadership demands a higher standard than effort alone. It requires the discipline to choose alignment over applause and stewardship over escalation.
To read more stories of surrender as a leadership practice, you can preorder Surrender to Lead at https://www.surrendertolead.com/.
Elsewhere In Culture
Jerome Powell’s response to the DOJ probe is less about ego or interest rates and more about a leader drawing a clear line around decision-making integrity. When Powell calls the investigation a “pretext,” he is naming something leaders inside organizations recognize immediately. Pressure masquerading as process. Oversight weaponized to influence outcomes. His point is straightforward. Accountability only works when it runs in the right direction. The Fed is accountable to evidence, economic conditions, and long-term stability. Not to who happens to be unhappy with the results in a given moment.
This is what holding power accountable actually looks like in practice. Powell is not refusing scrutiny of the renovation costs. He is refusing to let scrutiny be used as leverage. That distinction matters far beyond Washington. In companies, the fastest way to erode trust is to punish leaders for making principled decisions that don’t align with short-term preferences. The strongest cultures protect independence of judgment while demanding transparency of action. Powell’s pushback is a reminder that accountability is not about control. It is about clarity on who decides what, based on which data, and for whose benefit. When leaders defend that boundary, they are not being defiant. They are doing the job.
https://www.today.com/video/why-the-long-standing-tradition-of-happy-hour-is-drying-up-255856197843
This morning I joined The Today Show to talk about something that feels light on the surface, but says a lot about how work has changed: happy hour. For a long time it was one of those built in moments where relationships formed naturally, where you could connect with colleagues in a more human way, and where mentorships and friendships sometimes started without anyone even trying. As we’ve moved into hybrid and remote work, those spontaneous opportunities are harder to come by, and that shift has real impact on culture.
What stood out most in the conversation is that people still want connection, they’re just finding it differently. Whether it’s themed office gatherings, pop up social moments, run clubs, or even mocktails instead of cocktails, the point is the same: we need spaces where we can build trust and camaraderie outside of meetings and deadlines. The format will keep evolving, but the relationships are still the foundation, and the best leaders are the ones creating room for that on purpose.